U.s. on Pocket

A children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing tha

Earlier this year I traveled to Australia for the first time. I booked the tickets months in advance, made sure I had all the right power adapters, and headed to the airport on my day of departure — only to find out that U.S. citizens actually need a visa to enter the country. Whoops.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Saudi Arabia lashed out on Monday at the United States Senate for holding the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, personally responsible for the murder of a Saudi dissident in Istanbul, warning against interference in what it called the kingdom’s internal affairs.

ISTANBUL — Turkey’s foreign minister said Sunday that the United States was “working on” extraditing Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim religious leader who is wanted in Turkey on charges that he instigated a failed coup there two years ago. The presence of Mr.

Fuelled by outrage over Saudi Arabia's murder of journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, Congress on Thursday took a historic vote to rebuke the kingdom by ending U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe.

LONDON — Walk into Number 10 Downing Street, take the first left and straight ahead of you is the prime minister’s press office, an open-plan room of civil servants sitting in rows outside the grand corner office of Theresa May’s director of communications, Robbie Gibb.

The experts envision that it could become a model for future plants. The success of a reactor that can produce electricity from nuclear fusion will have major importance in the fight against climate change.

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea warned on Sunday that if the United States continued to escalate its sanctions and human rights campaign against the North, that approach could permanently shatter any chance of denuclearizing the country.

What do the economists at the International Monetary Fund see when they look at the U.S.? An economy in the midst of a long expansion ("its third longest expansion since 1850"), with "persistently strong" job growth, "subdued" inflation and something close to "full employment." But also this:

It’s college admissions season, which means it’s time once again for the annual flood of stories that badly misrepresent what higher education looks like for most American students — and skew the public debate over everything from student debt to the purpose of college in the process.

Although the U.S. is one of the richest societies in history, it still lags behind other developed nations in many important indicators of human development – key factors like how we educate our children, how we treat our prisoners, how we take care of the sick and more. In some instances, the U.

As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias points out, the problem with high infrastructure costs is that they force us to debate the wrong things. If costs were reasonable, even skeptics would probably agree to fix roads and build better trains.

The Millennial generation is forging a distinctive path into adulthood. Now ranging in age from 18 to 331, they are relatively unattached to organized politics and religion, linked by social media, burdened by debt, distrustful of people, in no rush to marry— and optimistic about the future.

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War.

The United States and allies are preparing for a possibly imminent series of limited military strikes against Syria, the first direct U.S. intervention in the two-year civil war, in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad's suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians.

Last week, Tracy Staedter from Discovery News proposed an interesting idea to me: Why not use the same algorithm from my Where’s Waldo article to compute the optimal road trip across every state in the U.S.? Visiting every U.S.

VideoA video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.Published OnCreditCreditU.S.

The first meeting, 1987: In June, George W. Bush goes to Capitol Hill to garner support for his father’s presidential campaign. Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, tells him he won’t endorse anyone for fear of jeopardizing his own House leadership ambitions.

House Republicans are proposing to fundamentally alter the way the federal government has been financing Medicaid for more than 50 years. The changes are part of their plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Three beliefs about globalization have propagated since the early 1980s. First, that globalization leads to a reduction in global inequality. Second, that high income growth among the richest will lift the incomes of the poorest.

U.S. dynamism is in the dumps: Americans are less likely to switch jobs, move to another state, or create new companies than they were 30 years ago (or 100 years ago). What’s going on? American restlessness is written into the national DNA.

Software businesses are disrupting generations-old industries, from agriculture to entertainment. Programming wizards are amassing billion-dollar fortunes, and this may be just the beginning. Even average tech employees in their mid-twenties are raking in 6-figure paychecks.

In August 2016, an inspector from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency arrived at Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana, a nerve center for the U.S. military’s global air combat operations, to conduct a routine look at the base’s handling of its hazardous waste.

Over the weekend, Chelsea Manning announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate by posting a video outlining the broad themes of her campaign. Manning, a whistleblower who served seven years in a U.S. military brig for exposing systemic U.S.

Part Three: The University of Iowa suspects at least 30 Chinese students of having used ringers to take their exams. The case offers a look inside a thriving underground economy of cheating services aimed at the hundreds of thousands of Chinese kids applying to and attending foreign colleges.

This is In Real Terms, a column analyzing the week in economic news. Comments? Criticisms? Ideas for future columns? Email me or drop a note in the comments. A plea to presidential candidates: Stop talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back from China.

The teachers strike in West Virginia may have ended last week when Gov. Jim Justice signed a law giving educators a 5 percent pay increase, but the fight in other states is just warming up. And this refrain is not new or unique to West Virginia.

At a time when Democrats are locked out of power from the White House, both chambers of Congress, the majority of governor’s offices and three-fifths of the country’s state houses, their ideas at least have one reliable outlet. Democrats still control most of the country’s biggest cities.

Public schools have always occupied prime space in the excitable American imagination. For decades, if not centuries, politicians have made hay of their supposed failures and extortions. In 2004, Rod Paige, then George W.

For half a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the linchpin of U.S. Mideast policy. A guaranteed supply of oil has bought a guaranteed supply of security. Ignoring autocratic practices and the export of Wahhabi extremism, Washington stubbornly dubs its ally “moderate.

Asking “[w]ho really rules?” researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page argues that over the past few decades America’s political system has slowly transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where wealthy elites wield most power.

In late October, Donald Trump released an action plan for what he hopes to accomplish in his first 100 days in office. Below, NPR reporters and editors from the politics team and other coverage areas have annotated Trump's plan.

Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are a 22-year-old college student in Kampala, Uganda. You’re sitting in class and discreetly scrolling through Facebook on your phone. You see that there has been another mass shooting in America, this time in a place called San Bernardino.

In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the Canadian province of Manitoba ran an unusual experiment: it started just handing out money to some of its citizens. The town of Dauphin, for instance, sent checks to thousands of residents every month, in order to guarantee that all of them received a basic income.

When Barack Obama meets this week with Xi Jinping during the Chinese president’s first state visit to America, one item probably won’t be on their agenda: the possibility that the United States and China could find themselves at war in the next decade.

An exclusive look at how the Bush administration ignored this warning from the CIA months before 9/11, along with others that were far more detailed than previously revealed. “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.

How can design make learning feel like less of a chore? It’s not as easy as it sounds. Flat out, people usually won’t go out of their way to learn something new. Research shows that only 3% of adults in the U.S. spend time learning during their day.¹

Russia’s cyberattack on the U.S. electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported.

The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers. We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand.

My company recently surveyed more than 350 U.S. business owners on the biggest time-wasters in their workdays. The results weren’t much of a shock, with email coming up on top (57%) by a three-to-one margin over phone calls and interruptions from colleagues, tied for second at 17% each.

I'd like to comment on topics that I think should regularly be on the front pages but are not -- and in many crucial cases are scarcely mentioned at all or are presented in ways that seem to me deceptive because they're framed almost reflexively in terms of doctrines of the powerful.

Leah Bahrencu's kidneys and liver shut down. Samantha Blackwell spent a month in a coma. Cindel Pena suffered heart failure. Heather Lavender lost her uterus. Every year in the U.S., nearly 4 million women give birth, the vast majority without anything going amiss for themselves or their babies.

After more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.

In the U.S., we tend to pile our main dish atop rice and call it a day, but in many other cultures, rice is served with a variety of toppings so that it can be enjoyed aside from the main dish. Here are a few suggestions to garnish your rice with tasty toppings.

Like other big contractors, American space companies have long expected some friendly support from their government. And Uncle Sam has usually been more than happy to help. Sometimes, though, government help causes more harm than good. Since 2005, U.S.

In recent days, there have been numerous media reports of a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee and American citizen who was forced to unlock his phone while returning to the United States at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

The United States is in decline. While not all major shocks to the system will be devastating, when the right one comes along, the outcome may be dramatic. Not all explosives are the same. We all know you have to be careful with dynamite.

See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com.GREENWICH, Conn.The Dow Jones and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes reached record highs on Thursday, having completely erased the losses since the stock market’s last peak, in 2007.

With Barack Obama sworn in for a second term—the first president in either party since Ronald Reagan to be elected twice with popular majorities—the GOP is in jeopardy, the gravest since 1964, of ceasing to be a national party.

Your About Us page is one of the most important pages on your website. It’s also likely to be one of the most frequently visited. So you’d better make it good. Think of it as an opportunity to introduce yourself to your visitors.

This post is all about WeChat, but it’s also about more than just WeChat. While seemingly just a messaging app, WeChat is actually more of a portal, a platform, and even a mobile operating system depending on how you look at it.

On December 2, 2015, an absolute tragedy occurred. 14 Americans were killed and 22 were seriously injured in a mass shooting in San Bernardino. Let me give you a hint. It’s not the one that comes in five flavors.

If you’re looking to start a small business this year, you might want to know where in the U.S. you’ll have a better shot at keeping it running. These small cities are the best spots to build from the ground up.

Returning to the U.S. from travels abroad can be a stressful experience. In addition to jet lag, sleep deprivation, and the usual hassles of air travel, you have to fill out a customs declaration form before you re-enter the country. U.S.

On October 3, a U.S. AC-130 gunship attacked a hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières in Kunduz, Afghanistan, partially destroying it. Twelve staff members and 10 patients, including three children, were killed, and 37 people were injured. According to MSF, the U.S.

DALLAS — Phillip Jones, whose job it is to court visitors to this city, spent months warning anyone who would listen: Economic pain will follow if Texas lawmakers pass laws seen as hostile to gay and transgender people.

After much anticipation, President Trump has decided to postpone his campaign promise of moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He signed a waiver Thursday to keep the embassy in Tel Aviv for the time being.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who made a career of promoting local control of education, has signaled a surprisingly hard-line approach to carrying out an expansive new federal education law, issuing critical feedback that has rattled state school chiefs and conservative education experts alike.

I consider Salon to be among the worst offenders of the new pseudo-journalism, and I have long maintained a personal boycott of the website. I ask my publishers to ignore any requests from its editors for interviews or for review copies of my books.

I want to show people this another way of living. That’s the reason why I started this digital nomad documentary project. I don’t want to say “you should be a digital nomad” or “this is so cool, awesome, hip, and better life!” in this film.

Dieter beware: U.S. News & World Report, in its high-profile January cover story on "best diets," calls the DASH and Mediterranean diets tops for health, though these regimens represent the failed nutritional status quo of the last 50 years. DASH is listed first in the U.S.

Botanists define a rheophyte as an aquatic plant that thrives in swift-moving water. Coming from the Greek word rhéos, meaning a flow or stream, the term describes plants with wide roots and flexible stalks, well adapted to strong currents rather than a pond’s or pasture’s stillness.

Black culture and the culture of poverty are not the same thing. Over the past week or so, Jonathan Chait and I have enjoyed an ongoing debate over the rhetoric the president employs when addressing African Americans.

In February 2004, U.S. troops brought a man named Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry to Abu Ghraib in Iraq and assigned him serial number US9IZ-157911CI. The prison was about to become international news, but the prisoner would remain largely unknown for the next decade.

On Sunday night in Las Vegas, 58 people were killed in a single mass shooting, one of the deadliest in American history. How does that compare with the daily gun deaths in cities across the United States? In Chicago, 58 people were killed by guns in a span of 28 days, counting back from Sept.

Given the refugee crisis, the potential Brexit, terrorism, and the recent economic crises in Greece and elsewhere, it can be easy to overlook the European Union as a viable region. In recent years, however, I have begun to believe that while the U.S.

For months, a small team of U.S. Navy investigators and federal prosecutors secretly devised options for a high-stakes international manhunt. Could the target be snatched from his home base in Asia and rendered to the United States? Or held captive aboard an American warship?

Between 2010 and 2015, more than 19 million people in the United States gained health insurance, mostly through key provisions under the Affordable Care Act, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute.

SAN JUAN, P.R. — With schools shuttered, pensions at risk and the island under the authority of an oversight board in New York City, half a million Puerto Ricans voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to become America’s 51st state, in a flawed election most voters sat out.

A few months ago I wrote about how you can encrypt your entire life in less than an hour. Well, all the security in the world can’t save you if someone has physical possession of your phone or laptop, and can intimidate you into giving up your password.

Shortly before 9/11, officials foresaw a fundamental shift in the nature of power. Nine months before the September 11 attacks—and just days after the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount, handing the presidency to George W. Bush—U.S.

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. The island has no electricity, and may not for months to come. Much of the water is undrinkable. About 80 percent of crop value is gone, a loss of $780 million. More than 3.

The decision by U.K. voters to leave the EU is such a glaring repudiation of the wisdom and relevance of elite political and media institutions that — for once — their failures have become a prominent part of the storyline.

In August 2016, the National Park Service celebrates their 100th year of managing the United States’ system of beautiful national parks. So what’s a better way to celebrate 100 years of stewardship than to visit all of the national parks in one epic road trip?

What to watch: Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican who has been a persistent critic of President Trump, is not seeking re-election. The Republican primary field to replace Mr. Flake includes Representative Martha McSally, as well as candidates who have highlighted their loyalty to Mr.

A 2017 ranking on global competitiveness from the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) shows the US in fourth place, it’s lowest position in five years, slipping from third a year earlier.